Craig Wright Claimed He Invented Bitcoin – Lawyers Prove Him Wrong

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The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, remains the biggest mystery in the global crypto industry.

Countless articles and podcasts have been devoted to finding the person or persons who launched bitcoin, which is now the basis of an entirely new asset class and billion-dollar investment.

For several years, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi based on his alleged evidence of a technological background, related meetings and pages of documents.

But earlier this year, a UK court put an end to the frenzied speculation – ruling that Wright was not the developer of bitcoin and said he had lied extensively and openly. As a result, Satoshi’s true identity remains a mystery.

The challenge against Wright was made by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), an industry group that is backed by companies such as exchanges Coinbase and Kraken, software company Microstrategy and Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin. They sought to end Wright’s claim to be Satoshi, a claim he used to support billions of dollars in damages claims against bitcoin developers for alleged theft.

The curious case centered on the issue of intellectual property rights and proved that Wright had no legitimate claim of authorship over Satoshi’s bitcoin white paper, the important founding text of crypto. It was published in 2008 and describes a peer-to-peer payment system that differs from traditional financial institutions, relying instead on blockchain technology.

“It was an unusual start,” says Phil Sherrell, partner and head of the London office at law firm Bird & Bird, which represented Copa in the case. Wright was represented by Shoosmiths. Rather than a fraud trial, the focus was to show that Wright had no right to Satoshi’s Bitcoin white paper and that he was not Satoshi.

“In the end, it always seemed to lead to a ‘Is he Satoshi?’ process—the copyright issue was the vehicle to get there,” explains Sherrell.

The case was brought after Wright, in late 2020, began emailing crypto developers and companies that hosted the bitcoin white paper on their websites, asking them to remove it, Sherrell said. Cryptocurrency developers and executives “became concerned about where this might lead and whether this was the start of a campaign around other Satoshi intellectual property rights,” he adds.

In order to prove that Wright was not Satoshi, Sherrell’s team began gathering evidence to show that he was lying. “In the end, it almost played out like a fraud trial—the whole point of the litigation was to undermine the documents and information that Wright was relying on to try to prove that he was Satoshi,” says Sherrell.

In one case, lawyers tried to disprove the legitimacy of the handwritten notes. Some of the Brisbane-born computer scientist’s evidence was based on handwritten notes he claimed were written in the early 2000s, scribbling ideas about bitcoin before the white paper was published.

Sherrell’s team found the printer of the notebook in China, proving that the exact version of that notebook had not been released until years after Wright’s claims.

In another example, lawyers debunked Wright’s claims that some of his computer documents were typed before 2008, using evidence from font designers. Witnesses testified that some fonts “were not even created until years after the supposed date of the document,” according to Sherrell.

In the judgment handed down by the UK High Court in May, Chief Justice Mellor said Wright “was unable to provide any coherent explanation for the forgeries which had been disclosed, and yet he could not accept. that he was responsible for them.”

“Dr. Wright lied to the court extensively and repeatedly,” the ruling concluded. “Most of his lies were related to the documents he had falsified. . . As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr. Wright resorted to other lies and evasions.”

Sherrell says, “It became clear that everything Wright said was based on things you could already find in the public domain about Satoshi’s life.”

A legal notice on Wright’s website now states that he is not Satoshi and that he has been ordered to stop any legal proceedings based on these false claims.

“It’s a victory for common sense and justice,” says Sherrell.